I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
I would also think that unscrupulous scrap buyers would offer a lower price for copper which has obviously been stolen or stripped from public works, since they are taking on more risk by buying it.
Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.
1. I don't believe you. Or at best, they're A/Bing you and letting you read a tiny modicum of content before forcing you to login. Actually, I'll donate $250 to a charity of your choice if you show me you on x.com mobile browser, logged out, and then load that link. *Any charity you want.*
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
I dislike X and normally use xcancel instead of giving them traffic.
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
I'm curious what cesspool you mean, because i can see cutting edge true hardcore science publication announcements on X better than elsewhere.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
Why do you think Moxie Marlinspike is not the type of person that would stay on this cesspool of a network that is X? From what I've seen I'd have been very surprised to see him anywhere else.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.
You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.
Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
Is 10% too high of an estimate for wealthy people that believe this? 50%? 75%? 90%?
Where would you throw the dart of your estimate and how wide do you think your error bounds are?
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
They should be liable for consequential damages.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.
India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
Glad I'm not the only one.
what's the issue here ????
Are those of you on X really this out of touch?
That you personally can’t read it doesn’t imply that everyone else here is a horrible person.
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
GOD I LOVE HN, I CANT REPLY NOW. WHY DO I BOTHER? Since I can't reply, and I was wrong: https://files.catbox.moe/kksyqz.png
Sure.
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/1.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/2.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/3.png
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
> *Any charity you want.*
I choose Habitat for Humanity.
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
https://streamable.com/5bvhdz
The whole text Marlin wrote is in the first post in the thread and therefore fully readable without logging in.
Donate to one of the following:
- https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/
- https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/
- https://immigrantjustice.org/ways-to-help/
I got https://i.imgur.com/JCeLEgG.png which is readable.
Then I enabled mobile browser using devtools and got https://i.imgur.com/ryJk07p.png which is unreadable.
I think mobile vs desktop was the central confusion. Mobile is broken logged out. Desktop works ok.
https://www.alzinfo.org/donate/donation_form/, in memory of Terry Pratchett.
https://imgur.com/a/w8HYdgz
I (still) like the EFF.
I'm able to read it while logged out - and if I wasn't, there's xcancel.com, and others.
You're not doing yourself any favours.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Picking:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.